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I could be wrong, but I think the worries over "Best Offer"
corrupting auctions values are more theory than practice. As sellers
who have tried it have reported, what you usually get are people sending you
absurd low-ball offers, thinking that for some reason that you will take $75
bucks for the item you have up for auction that is easily worth $200 or
$300. I think that's the kind of "best offer" one is likely to get for most
things and -- for a few highly desirable items -- you might get this
scenario:
Let's say the highly desirable item usually goes for around $5,000 and
the seller is starting it at $4,000 but it could go for $6,000 or
more if the right eager bidders get involved in a bidding war. In the past,
sneaky eager bidder #1 might email the seller and say, "Hey, I'll pay you $4,600
for it right now and you can just end the auction early." In this way, sneaky
bidder #1 hopes to cut out his competition for the item. Heck, he might even
offer $5,300 if he thinks the seller knows what the item is worth. The point is,
he is trying to short-circuit the competitive bidding for the item at
auction.
Now, this already happens anyway -- with sneaky bidder #1 simply sending
the seller a private email with his offer. So, now, if sneaky bidder
#1 simply uses the "Best Offer" option instead to try to get the seller to
end the auction early it's just a different way of doing what he would have done
anyway (and, of course, this way eBay gets its cut of the sale).
A seller who accepts a best offer on a highly desirable offer is being
foolish, because he almost certainly will get a higher price if the auction
continues to its normal end. Why? Because sneaky bidder #1 isn't going to make a
Best Offer that is *more* than he would be willing to bid at the end, probably
less. So it would be to the seller's advantage to take a pass on the Best Offer
for a really desirable item and see what happens during the last-minute
bidding.
Now, some sellers might not be so well-informed about value or
auction-savvy and accept the Best Offer, but then they also would have
accepted the email offer from sneaky bidder #1 if there were no such thing as
"Best Offer".
Really, the term comes from the classified ads, where you usually on see it
in conjunction with used car ads where the seller will say "$750 cash or best
offer". It is understood in that market place that "best offer" means an amount
BELOW the asking price, not higher. So, when people see "Best Offer" on an eBay
item, most all of them are going to be inclined to submit a low-ball offer which
the seller will ignore.
If you really want and item and are worried that the seller doesn't
know the real value of an item and might be inclined to take a low bid for it
(increasingly unlike these days on eBay) then make a "Best Offer" yourself...
even if the seller didn't place the "Best Offer" option in the auction
description, there's always the old send-'em-an-email ploy. If you don't, sneaky
bidder #1 probably will. This is the way of the world.
-- JR
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